Thirst for Salt

by Madelaine Lucas

It was a beautiful photograph, and I was surprised how much that hurt.

Briefly, it seemed like I had stumbled across an image from another life. That what I had seen was none other than the unrealized possibility of our long-ago love.

This is what happens when you break with one life to live another—it causes a doubling. Knowing eleven at night here is seven in the morning there. Some part of you is always in conversation with that other self.

Perhaps my mother is right. I’ve carried it all with me for too long. I need to find a place to put it all down. For so long I have lived like the woman in the parable, looking back to see whatever ruins lay behind me.

All her new beginnings took the shape of freshly painted walls, a roof under which nothing bad had ever happened. No wine spilled on the carpet, no fist-shaped hole through the drywall.

I was on the edge of something, I felt sure. I could sense it, as one catches the scent of salt on the wind when the ocean draws near, before it comes into view.

He looked at me the way he had in the deep—as if he could see through to the core of me, burning away all that was not essential, the way the high noon sun burns up all the water in the morning air.

TO RECALL THE PAST IS TO UNRAVEL THE TENDRILS OF A bluebottle jellyfish, map the welts left on my back and throat that summer, now long healed, though my body remembers them still.

Always the beggar for his love. I was like the desperate ocean, wearing away at him. The ceaseless questioning of the tide to the shore that I heard from our bedroom window all winter long. Asking, Do you love me? Do you love me?

I think we like the idea that people can learn from each other and change, my mother said. That we might sort of break each other in, like horses.

I searched his palms, trying to tell our future, but they only told stories about his past.

I say I’ve always been sad. That I can see the same sadness in the photos of myself when I was small. That today, recognizing it as the sadness I’ve always had, I could almost call it by my own name, it’s so like me.

If Jude was a house, I sensed that he held many hidden rooms. He had turned the light on in only one of them, and he’d made me feel so welcome, so warm, that I’d forgotten about all those other places left in the dark.

Maybe it started back then, the belief that she could outrun any feeling if she moved fast enough, and I imagined it came back to her in certain moods. The desire to ride all night, like she’d never been hurt.

It is easy, I have learned, to mistake solitude for softness, for depth.

Jude, I would learn, needed not to feel bound to anyone—love with a loose leash. To return not out of obligation but of his own free will, and for me to trust that he would. To Jude, that was love. That trust. He needed my faith in him in order to feel free.

But I could see it, behind his eyes. Some hurt there. It had never occurred to me that I could hurt him, that even a grown man might have a heart still raw in places.

we had this in common—both of us out of step with the present, longing for some other time, some other place.

Sitting opposite Jude at the table, with the tea brewing between us, I felt like we’d promised to tell each other a secret and after I’d revealed mine, he’d changed his mind.

Jude thought we should be like a gift to each other, but I longed to be essential.

I loved best in gestures, in metaphors, and I wanted to build a life out of what I loved.

The books Jude brought me had been handled, covers worn, spines showing through the threadbare binding like a skinned knee. I liked the way they felt haunted by other hands, the feeling that time didn’t really keep us apart, wasn’t an unbreachable gap. That I could touch the same objects as the ghosts of other times. I felt their presence in the parsed-over pages, the pencil marks, obscure annotations.

But for the first time it was becoming obvious to me that there was no one way to live your life. Each of us had to make her own choices, and in that we were all on our own.

I told him that I’d always been afraid of wanting anything so badly that it becomes visible. For years I’d tried to compress my desires, to burn them away, like waste.

And while intellectually I knew that both things could be true—that the love and regret did not necessarily cancel each other out—it was difficult for me to contemplate because a function of that love meant wanting me to make different choices, and might this not also imply that she considered them mistakes?

We lived in each other’s pockets then, as if we were joined by an invisible thread, the way Jude had said the moon was bound to the tide.

THE TROUBLE IS THAT OUR DREAMS, LIKE OUR MEMORIES, are not immune to revision.

I really did think he’d changed, Maeve said. But none of us really do, do we? If anything, I think we tend to double down over time, become more stubbornly ourselves. People don’t grow up after all, I’m sure of it. We just get more things, have children.

She had a whole world inside of her it seemed, and in that moment, I felt empty.

it struck me then, the way she called Jude by his full name. How much better it sounded, coming from her. It felt as if she had tried on my coat and it fit her the way it was supposed to, where on me it hung over my wrists, was too big in the shoulders.

I hated the way they spoke like that. As if there could be no measurement of their past in years. As if I, so young, couldn’t possibly understand the way time worked, and what it did to people.

I do miss you, I thought, though he was right there with me, standing in the morning light, and I was holding him.

LOVE, I STILL BELIEVE, EXISTS outside of time. Or it is its own time. It makes its own measures—not in minutes or hours or calendar days but in something closer to seasons, or tidal movements.

It was a strange feeling, stepping into the life I’d always wanted and imagined for myself, like I’d cheated somehow. It was love the way love should be—a story I was telling myself and roping him in. A thread I tied around the two of us, binding him to me.

WE ARE TAUGHT THAT LOVE IS NOT SO DIFFERENT FROM hatred, that instead of opposites, the two extremes of the human heart might in fact be twins. But it’s grief, really, that is love’s twin, that knows no bounds of time or space.

Do you still love Jude? I think a part of me always will. It always feels that way at first, she said. But it will stop. I promise. And I didn’t know then if that was better, if I even wanted it to. At the time, that seemed to me like the saddest thing.

THERE MUST BE PEOPLE out there who are not drawn to the shadow of what could have been, who feel no pull toward the other lives they could be living, but I certainly have never been one of them.

As all lovers learn, when love ends, you lose the future as well as the past.

it’s not so easy to forget, to leave the past behind. It follows after, like a loose hem or a wake in water. You drag it with you when you go.

It looked, he’d said, like hell. Not an empty underground of devils and brimstone but a place where everything you love is burning. A place you used to recognize, and call home.

Maybe life would deliver all the things we wanted, I thought, just never at the right time or with the right person.

thought it would be enough just to know he was alive, but life contained more possibilities than I had allowed for.

A MAN STRIKES A MATCH and starts a fire in the house of love. A woman takes a pill to make herself bleed. Or maybe it’s gin and horses, or a plane ticket to a place that makes you think of summer, where every day might be a holiday—at least from the life that you’ve been living. What continues to surprise me, and what I still don’t understand, is not the reasons that love ends but the way that it endures.

It never really goes away, the longing for the life not lived, because isn’t that part of how we come to know ourselves too? Through what we lack as much as what we have, all we dream but do not hold. Some desires have no resolution.

I thought that if no place could ever house everyone I loved, whatever home I hoped to make could only be shaped by absence.